I have to say I’m glad we
didn't
schedule a time to meet in London or plan trips around
anywhere. As it was, it was an intense, complex and
too short a time there.
Next time remind me to stay longer.

Apart from all the marching around the West End and Covent Garden
and even Carnaby Street and Wardour Street and outside the Keyboard Shop on
Denmark Street where I first met Ian Jones, and trips to photograph the
dehissing towers where my favourite drug dealer lived in back in 1981 – I mean..
I marched everywhere and up and down Portobello Road and even out to KEW to see
the queues of people going to see THE LIGHTS…. And Jim’s party.. . which was the
least interesting thing.. because really… everybody had THE LONDON LOOK! But I
mean.. they have it down pat. As Jim says, ‘they know how to follow
instructions!!’ Every girl looked perfect… not only their figures, but their
hair, make-up, their nails.. every detail.. like they were
born that way and it was effortless… but I did notice, there are instructions
everywhere (as Jim suggested) so.. of course…with
a little keen attention to detail,
they can make themselves look the ticket..
Still.. for a brief moment, I just wanted to run screaming from the building and
find a hairdresser to bleach and crop
my locks into the 'London
Look'
Perfection!

Anyway….. After all that nonsense…. Thursday’s tripto the British Museum was such a peaceful
haven and sucb an
interesting trip,
(even though Jim who also spent many hours of his life roaming around those
hallowed halls,calls it a ‘Zoo
of Stolen
Treasures’..)Yes
it is, BUT STILL.. the place is incomparable. I spent a good few hours roaming the Eqyptian, Mesopotamian and Assyrian
rooms.. of which there are many. Actually, there
seem to be more rooms now than before (has the building grown?)
and maps on the wall showing the names of all the place the Americans have spent
the last 25 years bombing into dust - from
Basra to Aleppo.. so I felt a bit embarrassed really (as an American and clearly by birth, part of
the campaign against the Muslim world)
and then heaved a sigh of relief that the Museum had managed to save a
few of these treasures from the ‘Cradle of
Civilization’ before their annihilation.…

vis
a vis the GiantWinged
Assyrian Guardians:

But as I roamed I noticed there seemed to be
an increase in the number of sarcophagi and Mummies… yes....
They seem to have many more MUMMIES now than I have ever seen there
before. As I strolled around the glass cases filled
with what are ostensibly ‘people’ stored inside them,
I found it deeply ‘deep’ in some unfathomable
sense and yet on the surface just so
‘creepy’ (and I don’t even
like that word) to keep the sacredly dead hanging around a museum like so much
firewood. They were just everywhere. Mummies.. wrapped in their soaked cloths
and trappings of station.. some with golden painted masks and otherswth just eyes and mouths
painted onto their cloth-shrouded faces, and so many with an x-ray alongside to
show us the ‘bones’ of the queen or princeling within,. Theyeven had cat mummies and
baby Bull mummies and hedghog mummies.. it was a f*cking MUMMYFEST!But what shocked me most;
so many people wanted a photograph of themselves.. alongside a MUMMY!

And then
a bit of this, a bit of that… a bit of mummified bull, a bit of mummified
cat…with it’s fish supper.

So yes....
Dead bodies everywhere… and if that was not enough.. now they’ve got TWO men
pulled out of the marshes.. Previously they had only the ‘Tollund Man’.. he was
blue and sad from Denmark somewhere with a twisted writhing scream of emptiness
on his lips, but now they’ve got the Gebelen Man… he is even more like some poor
human being crushed by fate and rolled up and put in a hole and covered over
like an eternal foetus.. It saddens me to look upon him, but there they are..
the tourists posing smiliing having their photos taken next to Gebelen Man…
(I won’t post photos of him because somehow it
just seemed so un’right’ - so goulish - he looked like he was just sleeping.)

Of course next to the dead people were
the Coptic Martyrs

And after the Coptic Martyrs in a Room
dedicated to the ENLIGHTENMENT was a giant plynth with naked young men with
colts’ tails chasing each other 'round it. The start of Trans-Species LGBT!

Anyway....The art and symbology, the
ancient perfect arcane language of artisans, priests and Hierophants.. every
image is carved painted engraved to carry the ultimate complete message. Even if
it is 10,000 years old and in our dull modernity we think we’re ‘smart’ human
beings and they were crass and uneducated. Boy, they could teach us a thing or
two.

Lastly.. I photographed the beautiful new
Foster Dome. I know it’s been on the building a while now.. but it’s the first
time I’ve seen it. Really Suzy.. we MUST GO the next time I come down.

Anyway.. after the profound.. came the
PROFANE.. I went to meet Mr K at his house in Islington..which (and memory
defies me on this) is a COMPLETE house.. (as in, a big housein a great part of London –
Islington - and DETACHED (not emotionally, just physically) with all the
trimmings and an XJS in the drive andwhich, even though I’dslept there a few times.. I
remembered NOT AT ALL., OH Klaus.. he DESERVES an essay.. but not now. Another
time.. he is a man-mountain unto himself. A being beyond all laws except those
cosmic laws that leave the rest of us wondering how the ‘rest of them’ get away
with everything. He has gotten away with the lot in his life, but then again, he
was arrested on Wednesday morning..(I hope he was wearing his blue thong when
they rang his doorbell, (which is what he greeted me wearing.) Anyway we’ll see
what happens with that. Of course he says, ‘Electra! Nothing will happen with
that.. they have no charge.’

He managed rock bands, played heavy metal
drums and had a finger in every pie! ie. strip clubs, shops on Carnaby Street and
an Israeli partner who’d been a Bomb Disposal Expert, who I am absolutely
CERTAIN worked for Mossad! Anyway Mr K as he was when I first met him 34 years ago:

and
Mr K as he is now….looking
a bit like Robert Plant. Relaxing at home, about to whip up some
Tagliatellii
before he starts beating heck out of his £15,000 drum kit! (“The same kit Nick
Mason of Pink Floyd uses!”)

So.. it’s been beyond interesting and beyond
intense.. I strolled down every single centimetreof memory lane.. all the bits I’d forgotten
the last three times I was strolling there. I can say it’s been nothing short of
‘provocative’. Tomorrow is yet another journey up to Leicester to see Ian’s mum.

I hope you are well.. I sent a card to your mum
and dad in Looe. I guess you’l get this whenever you get it.